The aforementioned Tango Song was something I purchased on a whim. My physical Crowley collection is light, and I normally don't indulge in the ultra-obscure items. I have been a little intrigued of Crowley from a literary perspective—or at least his literary ambitions.
Aleister Crowley was never as influential on me as he was on some people. Although I had Magick Book IV, I think I was 5 years younger than when most—obsessed by British punk/post-punk—poured over his volumes of work.
Although I won't say that I collect vinyl records, I can certainly tell you that my vinyl record collection has grown over the course of the last 12-18 months. I never had a record player in my youth, but my father and uncle both did—with an enormous collection of records.
How many New Year's resolutions have been broken over the course of several decades? I'm guilty of this all the time. Although I've made steady improvements year over year in my life, the hard defined New Year's resolution is always something that we approach as a binary in terms of success or failure.
When Apple TV+ released the first season of Foundation, I realized that I hadn't read Isaac Asimov's Foundation series at all—only being familiar with his robot tales.
I never really paid much attention to who Mitch Horowitz was until Douglas Rushkoff had him on a live special on Team Human. He seemed reasonably intelligent and had a good grasp on the occult.
Yesterday I took my black gi from Kajukenbo and all my Kaj and Aikido belts and put them in the trash can. I studied Aikido in my 20's and did quite well at it until my progress was derailed by a relationship.
When I first dove into the Internet I had started an ecommerce site during a time when you had to type "online bookstore" into Altavista in order to find Amazon on the web. People often laugh when I recollect being 16-17 years old and mailing cash to Amazon for books. For the first few years I even received free Christmas gifts from them for being a frequent shopper.
I mentioned previously that I pulled over a number of Codepunk and Apotheosis articles under hckr fyi to mostly represent a best of, and a consolidation of various writing projects over the decades. I was in the process of doing the same thing for Key 23 when I realized... there really wasn't much to bring over.
I promised myself that this new blog would not tetter off into the past with immersive odes to nostalgia. That is still the case; however, I do feel the need to close the book on a number of projects, and in doing so, consolidate some of those projects under the current domain name.
Coil's earlier work is harsh, masculine, and profound—a band interested in only making music for themselves, but there was always a hint of something more esoteric. This became more pronounced with the release of Love's Secret Domain and by the time the band entered their Moon Musick phase, that hint was a much fuller halucinatory experience.
As I start writing this, it's January 2nd, 2024. It will likely be published a few days later. The year has just turned over to a new number and tomorrow (January 3rd) will represent my 45th revolution around the sun.
I used to blog consistently. At peak, I was probably producing one high quality blog post a week on technology. I also co-produced one podcast and completely handled another.
At the end of Neuromancer, the Wintermute artificial intelligence (with the help of Henry Case and Molly Millions) broke down the firewall preventing Wintermute from reaching the other artificial intelligence—the namesake of the book... Neuromancer.
Some of you might be wondering where the original Codepunk podcast is. There was a lot of talk about building a Codepunk space in virtual reality (using Facebook Horizon... or Meta Horizon... or whatever it's called now)...
The story of the Russian Internet is a story that reaches as far back as early dissendent papers and the birth of telecoms in the region. It's an interwoven story of the control of information from paper to sound waves to Internet packets aimed at philosophy, conspiracy, and journalism.
I'm happy to see this entry for Apotheosis—not just because it's the 10th entry, but because it wraps up the Mondo 2000 3-parter, which followed on the heels of the Boing Boing 3-parter. Revisiting both publications/communities just reminds me too much about how the edgier (experimental would be a more appropriate term) aspects of cyberculture quickly fell to commercialism, leaving those in the community stranded.
I had heard bits and pieces about Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, but it was mostly sitting on my wish list as something I'd get to in the future until the Exponential View reading group picked it for their book club. I decided to put some of my other reading on hold and dove in since I felt it would provide some good debate and discussion with other thinkers from across various industries.
If you're first exposure to Mondo 2000's narrative of the Internet was with The Cyberpunk Handbook you might have looked no further—sending it to the trash heap—not even fit for recycling. But those who grew up and explored the Internet during Mondo's days didn't live in reverse like we're doing with this look back at cyber history. The handbook was the final push of California cyberpunk satire, but Mondo did lived on the edge for a few years, much like the earlier zine version of Boing Boing.
In the last post, we had some fun reliving a little early 2000's Internet culture, but what we're doing here is digging deeper into the roots of cyberspace. That brief interlude was me reminiscing of a time when I was highly involved in an underground culture, while also checking in on an old friend and his work...
Many my age still remember the years of personal bulletin board systems (BBS) when the Internet was young (and more explicitly tied to the telecoms). Eventually, cyberspace emerged as a collective of protocols with BBS, IRC chat channels, and UseNet newsgroups filling out additional communication channels. I remember following newly created UseNet newsgroups dedicated to the very first SciFi Channel original programming (long before it became whatever SyFy is supposed to stand for).
I'm sure you're tired of hearing my opinion on Boing Boing at this point, so you'll be happy to know that this is the last Codepunk post and Apotheosis episode on the subject.
Although the history of Boing Boing paints a picture of geek chic with a thriving community and an almost playful cyber-indulgence, the blog (and those running the blog) is not without the occasional head-turning controversy...
Boing Boing was a zine before it became a web site, and although zines were not exclusive to the counterculture and cyberculture eras, the proliferation of zines reached its apex in the late 80's/early 90's.
One billion seconds is a phrase that has accumulated usage over the course of our most recent evolution of memes. Representing a little over 31.5 years (which isn't nearly as fancy as saying one billion seconds)...
You can blame Ben Brown for this one. I mentioned Ben in the previous Apotheosis post. He's a current Microsoft engineer that works on the Bot Framework Composer, but made a name for himself...
For a significant time now being a software engineer—being a technology worker—has given us the impression that we are not labor. That we are not the working class.
I miss the Gopher protocol. That's an odd statement to make because the Gopher protocol wasn't successful long-term and it had quite a few drawbacks, but the Gopher protocol was an Internet protocol...
Every generation—once they reach around 40 years of age—starts to think about how things were when they grew up, and we all come to the same conclusion about how our childhood was better.
Modern culture siphons value from past generations in order to pre-package large quantities of the next big trend for quick financial extraction. The result of this is the raiding of authenticity from past generations into a pale meme of itself. Much of the modern generation seems to live off of memes, YouTube video clips, and recycled collage advertisements that fake and feed nostalgia.
I often forget a lot of tech pundits come from the finance sector and it's not so much an expertise in technology as it is an expertise...
I mentioned recently that I took the time to remove applications like Twitter and LinkedIn from my phone in order...
Email. We used email. I slowly came to the realization that I hadn't done this much recently, feeling like email was a burden of communication instead...
Cal Newport, unfortunately, slots right in with the rest of them. I was recommended Deep Work by several people that I highly...
This isn't going to be a hard science piece, so turn off your computer if you had high expectations. This is more a philosophical debate...
A few weeks ago I divested myself of all my Bitcoin and used a fraction of the proceeds to buy a computer. You can watch me unbox the new computer on YouTube...
I read a lot of book about a variety of subjects, but as someone who studied clinical psychology and philosophy in college, I also like to read about the metaphysical layer on top of some of these subjects...
According to Brand and futurist Paul Saffo, pace layers are a framework for thinking about the health of society and how it functions. The idea originated in the Clock of the Long Now book published over two decades ago.
As expected, the number of think-pieces on the end of cities (or the mega city in particular) have increased exponentially. Prior to the pandemic, all trend lines pointed to the continued migration to cities...
It wasn't that long ago that people believed Virtual Reality and VR headsets were dead in the water. The popularity of the Oculus—and the emergence of the Oculus Quest as a wireless—option seems to have quelled that talking point...
I used to review a decent amount of books on Amazon a few decades back. For a while there, my ranking was pretty high. As a result, I would often get researched and emailed by authors looking to give...
The neat thing about Watson's NLU is that it doesn't just track sentiment, but actually attempts to detect and analyze emotions as well. If asked, it'll return an emotion score object containing five emotions and their various scores.
Behavior can be unpredictable. Are we really sure we want to pattern robots and chatbots after that? The greatest example in recent memory is Microsoft's Tay, which was revisited and profiled in a story on ZDNet in July.
Way back in March of 2017, we did a podcast episode on the Microsoft Bot Framework. Shortly thereafter, I (Michael) started working on a book about how to build chatbots with the Bot Framework Node.JS SDK.
Social media wants your attention like any other media company, and both Twitter and Facebook find ways to keep you on their site rather than allow you to click-through to another application or web site. They even build their own in-line browsers, so even if you want to read an article, it's minimal effort to return to those holding you captive.
Facebook's announcement of Libra should come with zero shock attached. The social media company's entire business model revolves around keeping people within their walled garden, invading all aspects of their attention and lives.
This issue of the newsletter was prompted by a rediscovery of a 2017 Wired article where researchers showed that you could encode malicious software onto DNA--software that doesn't affect the human host in the traditional sense of biohacking, but instead affects gene sequencers, and other genetic or forensic software and machines.
We often laugh that the government is eternally behind the curve when it comes to software and IT infrastructure upgrades, but one thing is certain... Technology has consistently and fundamentally shaped our political theater over the decades.
I gave a talk on chatbots at a recent JavaScript conference in Richmond, Virginia. The crowd was lighter than some of the other talks, and I've actually noticed a downward trend in attendance on sessions about chatbots.
Many of the 'ethics of AI' discussions exist in a vacuum. What I mean is that we often refer to something that AI does (or that we think AI will do in the future), and we...